Unravelling the secrets of wine

Personalisation and customisation are two trends that have taken the beverages industry by storm. Product design and development firm Cambridge Consultants has tapped in to these trends – applying its world-class capabilities of consumer insight and science-led innovation to the wine industry.

The company has devised a wine-blending experience, where the consumer can adjust the composition on demand – demystifying the huge and often confusing choice of wine available to consumers.

Wine is as much a science as it is an art, often making wine selection a difficult process. With an overwhelming range of wines to choose from, most people stick to the few they know or simply buy on impulse. The company wanted to make it simpler for consumers to explore new wine and make a more informed choice.

Cambridge Consultants has analysed the chemical make-up of a selection of different wines and looked at what imparted the most distinctive characteristics. This allowed the company to choose a set of four base wines and programme the Vinfusion system to deliver hundreds of different flavours on demand.

The Vinfusion system allows the user to customise their wine using simple terms like full-bodied or light, dry or sweet. The consumer uses a simple app to make their personalised choice and learns a little more about wine along the way. Vinfusion then uses its unique flavour algorithm to blend and dispense the perfect wine.

“Blending wines to achieve a certain flavour or aroma has been around for centuries and this is at the heart of Vinfusion,” said Sajith Wimalaratne, food and beverage commercial manager at Cambridge Consultants. “One of the challenges is understanding the complex relationship between the taste and the proportions of the blended wines. So we surveyed how consumers choose wines and ran taste tests to see how they perceived and described the flavours.”

As the name suggests, Vinfusion is a fusion of chemistry, physics, engineering and user-centred design. It’s an example of how the company uses consumer insight to understand a gap in the market – and science-led innovation to address complex challenges and, subsequently, create unique experiences tailored to individual customers.

Cambridge Consultants will be demonstrating its personalised wine technology at BrauBeviale 2016, November 8-10, at the Exhibition Centre, Nuremberg, stand 9-518.